Fiends Read Online Free PDF

frayed handkerchief, and stared at the logo on the front of the cap: a bird with a big yellow beak and a crimson tail, perched on a bat. The Cards were not having a good year. Even Harry Caray, the St. Louis broadcaster, had sounded a little exasperated when the team blew a three-run lead in the bottom of the ninth in San Francisco. But that was nothing compared to Marjory's reaction as the ball sailed over the wall above the center-fielder's glove. Everybody knew you pitched McCovey inside, jammed him, then showed him the low-breaking curve. She hadn't been able to get to sleep for two hours after listening to the game. Prickly heat was only part of her problem, although she'd suffered from it since she was a baby. Some fudge ripple ice cream would have calmed her down, but when she went downstairs in her babydolls at two in the morning there was no fudge ripple in the freezer, only some rainbow sherbet that had ice whiskers on it and looked unpalatable. Enid and her boyfriend must have sat on the front porch until after midnight eating all of the ice cream and most of the sour-cream cake, satisfying one appetite and working up another before sneaking upstairs to Enid's room (but Marjory was alert to that, even though she was hanging on every pitch of the ballgame and the old oscillating fan on the window seat of her room was making its usual racket). She wondered what time Ted had gone home. She didn't mind Ted as much as she pretended, but was scared Enid was going to slip—if she was on the pill then she must be keeping them in her purse, the one place Marjory wouldn't snoop—and wind up having to marry him. Ted Lufford was not what Marjory had in mind for Enid. Not with her looks, talent, and brains.
    There was no breeze where she sat on the parking-lot island. They hadn't had much rain for a couple of months, only a few brief thunder-showers that didn't provide long-lasting relief from the torrid days and humid nights of middle Tennessee. Marjory went through the pockets of her shorts looking for a box of fruit-flavored Chiclets she hadn't finished, and popped two into her mouth. She looked at the high gates of the mental institution and the dozen buildings on the landscaped grounds. Two big sprinklers near the gate were at work on parched lawns. There were flowerbeds, magnolia and mimosa trees among the larger oaks, wide walkways—from her perspective it might have been a college campus. Inside, Marjory thought, it was like a morgue where they let the corpses walk around. Enid had given her an abbreviated tour. Once was going to last Marjory forever. She had such a horror of the asylum her knees locked before she had gone very far; listening to the inmates, cries and babble echoing, her underarms boiled with sweat and a tight, terrible grin stayed on her face so that she thought she must look like one of them— any second the people who ran the place were going to make a bad mistake and lock Marjory up. Night of the Living Dead, which she had been persuaded to see at the drive-in a couple of months ago, hadn't bothered her nearly as much as fifteen minutes inside Cumberland State.
    How Enid had the stomach for it, she just couldn't imagine.
    Since Marjory, two years ago, had taken over trying to manage certain important aspects of her sister's life, she had not (might as well admit it) met with much success. Enid had breezed through the finals of Vandy's Maid of Cotton contest when she was a junior; then she balked at entering the preliminaries of the Miss Tennessee Pageant, although Marjory argued with her until she was just about blue in the face. "Balked" wasn't quite the right word: Enid didn't argue back. She seldom felt the need to defend herself or a cherished viewpoint. She would not enter another beauty contest, period. Not because she had doubts about her looks (Enid was serenely aware that God had been generous with her). She simply had no desire, as she put it, "to compete in frivolous